LEANNE SEIDLER'S STORY
My conversations with Leanne were very different, right from the beginning. She is much less methodical and orderly than her husband, and we tended to jump from one subject to another. In addition, she was obviously unhappy and anxious, and a mixture of guilt and defiance was evident from the very moment she first came into my office by herself.
"Well, I guess it's time now to hear from the slut, right?" She stared at me as if daring me to agree with her.
"I've never found that to be a very useful term, actually," I said.
"What shall we call me, then--the wife who can't keep her legs closed? The evil, cuckolding whore?"
"Is that how you think of yourself, Leanne?" I asked.
Suddenly she started to cry. "No!" she said. "Oh, I don't know! Maybe I do, a little."
She dried her tears with a tissue. "I never used to--not before Mark and I were married, not even before...before THIS happened.
"I am...I was...a very sexual person. It was something I learned about myself back in my teens, and it's been true ever since. Sex means a lot to me. And the thrill, the excitement, of being with different people--I've always needed that.
"But I never felt like a whore before."
"And what's caused that change?"
"The way Mark looks at me! The way he shuffles through life now, all crushed and self-pitying. The way he can't make love to me any more, or even stand to be around me..." She was crying again, quietly, looking at me.
"After dinner he disappears into his office with his paperwork, or gets lost in front of a ballgame on TV. And he'll stay up until long after I've gone to sleep, or he'll give me a peck on the cheek and go off to sleep in the guest room. I miss him! I want him back, and he won't let me in.
"Tell me, Tom! Tell me, please: what did I do that was wrong? We had an agreement, and no one can say that I didn't keep my side of the bargain. I was totally careful, totally discreet.
"And then Mark came home early one afternoon, and I didn't hear the phone because I was outside, and it's all gone to hell. I'm afraid for him and afraid for my marriage. I'm scared he'll never come back to me."
We sat a few minutes more, while she cried. I handed her the tissue box after a while and she took it without comment. Finally, when she was calmer, I said, "I hope that I can help. I think I can. But I need to know more; is it all right if we go back to the beginning?"
As I said, Leanne didn't tell me her story in a nice chronological order, but I got the gist of it. She was the third in a family of three girls, growing up in Minneapolis. Her mother was a homemaker, and her father, a history professor at the University of Minnesota, was cold, distant, and demanding. Leanne was never as outstanding a student as her eldest sister Mary, nor as good an athlete as her middle sister Kaitlyn, and she always struggled to win her father's approval.
By high school, however, she was clearly the prettiest, and she reveled in her father's belated attention and compliments. Getting the attention of high school boys was a natural extension of getting the attention of her father--only easier--and she basked in it.
She learned how to flirt, how to be sexy without seeming cheap, and the boys flocked to her. Despite not being a cheerleader, the usual requirement for social success, she became the girlfriend of the quarterback on the football team in her junior year and held onto him until they both graduated.
This was partly because she was a bright, attractive and charming girl, and partly because she was willing to have sex with him. Bradley was no virgin when he took Leanne's virginity; but unlike many jocks he was a kind, caring boy, and he really loved Leanne. He was gentle and patient; so her first experience of intercourse was somewhat painful but not at all frightening, and she was happy to continue having sex with him.
Her mother quietly got her on the pill, as she'd done for Leanne's two older sisters, and Leanne and her boyfriend fucked whenever they could find a time and place to do it--every week at least. She found that she adored sex—apparently far more than girls typically do, at least according to the magazines she read.
But after six months or so of screwing only Bradley, she began to be more and more curious about other boys, and more and more tempted to try one of them. Only her strong sense of loyalty and faithfulness to the boy she was sure she was going to marry kept her from acting on her temptations.
"But I'll tell you," she said, "it sure didn't keep me from fantasizing. There were about six boys in my senior class, and a couple of teachers, I used to daydream about having sex with. Sometimes at night I'd masturbate while imagining doing it with one of them, and it was far more exciting than when I fantasized about Bradley.
"One night in my senior year I came home early and my big sister Mary was upstairs on her bed screwing her college boyfriend Teddy. They'd come for a weekend visit. Since they thought they were totally alone in the house she hadn't even closed the bedroom door!
"So I sneaked upstairs and watched them do it. I'd never been so turned-on in my life. Teddy was much bigger than Bradley--he had a bigger cock, I mean--and I was soaking my panties thinking about how it would feel inside me. I knew I could never do it with him, but I daydreamed about him for weeks."
When Leanne began college at the University of Minnesota and Bradley went off to Grinnell College in Iowa, it wasn't much more than two months before their long-distance romance fell apart; he'd met someone else. So much for the man she was going to marry! Leanne was unhappy and hurt, but only for a few days. Then she began to realize that the good-looking guys at Minnesota who were always flirting with her in the dorm or the cafeteria weren't off-limits any more.
"I decided I didn't want another boyfriend, at least not for a while. The whole time I'd been with Bradley I had fantasies about lots of different guys, and this was my chance."
So Leanne gave in to the temptations of casual sex, dating several different men at the same time and having sex with nearly all of them, often on the first or second date. It was exciting, having all that male attention, and she loved it for a few weeks. But she quickly found that her behavior was causing problems.
"First, all that partying was keeping me from getting my studying done, and I nearly flunked two of my courses that first semester. Second, I'd slept with three different guys in my dorm, and word started to get around that I was a pushover. I had all sorts of jerks coming up to me and making crude remarks, or even trying to cop a feel. And then a guy I met in a bar, who I was more than ready to go off to bed with, turned out to be into some pretty rough stuff!
"A girl from my history class saw me with him and pulled me into the Ladies Room. She told me her roommate had gone out with him the previous year and he'd beaten the hell out of her during sex--she ended up in the Emergency Room with bruises on her face and two broken ribs!
"Well, that scared the shit out of me. I slipped out the back door of the bar, so I could avoid the guy, and I went back to my dorm and decided to make some changes."
I was very impressed by Leanne's account of how she took control of her situation, thinking carefully about what she wanted and how to get it while keeping herself safe. First, she cut down on her dating to 2-3 times a week, to make sure that her studies didn't slide.
Second, she resolved to stop getting involved sexually with anyone in her dorm or in her classes. It was easy enough on a big campus to meet men, and much safer for her reputation if they weren't men who saw her every day or knew all her friends.
Third, she enrolled in a Women's Self-Defense course offered by the Phys. Ed. department. She took the course for three semesters, and got very good at the maneuvers necessary to protect herself if a guy got rough, which happened once or twice. Finally, having seen a scary film about STDs at a dorm meeting, she vowed to use condoms from then on without exception.
For the remainder of her time at Minnesota Leanne was a successful student, active in her sorority, with many friends; all the while having sex with a succession of men, usually not more than once or twice each. Her friends occasionally teased her about not having a boyfriend, or wondered aloud why the cute guys they sometimes saw her with never seemed to appear a second time.
But she was very careful to keep the details of her sex life completely private. She almost always had sex with the men she met in their rooms or apartments, ideally some distance away from her own dorm. Occasionally the back seat of a car proved to be a suitable spot, and a few of her lovers even sprang for a motel room from time to time.
Leanne told me all about this with excited pleasure, but not without a certain defensiveness. She understood all too well what society thinks of a woman who behaves this way, even though a man who does the same thing is considered a "stud" or a "player".
"Tom, I loved what I did--I don't regret it and I'm not going to apologize for it, okay?"
"You don't have to apologize, Leanne," I said. "I believe that consenting adults can have as much or as little sex as they want, with anyone they want, in any way they want, as long as everyone is in agreement. Our culture frowns on certain behaviors by women, but that's our culture's problem."
